In the mid-1990s an argument emerged among some scholars that an era of “postnationalism” was changing​ the way citizenship was being constructed. Since then, not only did an enormous discussion ensue, ​ but detailed and extensive empirical studies emerged to test the postnational argument. In particular, these studies have focused their main attention on the role of migration as key factor challenging the traditional type of liberal citizenship, and hence, driving the emergence of a postnational citizenship. Yet, probably everybody will agree, in 2016 and on all sides of the debate, t​hat the postnational projections gave a rather optimistic cast to the future of citizenship and human rights. The political interest in migration and postnational citizenship has never stopped expanding over time, but it has gradually taken a new twist with successive increases of migration. In the Mediterranean area in particular, which is by now an area perceived to be ‘flooded’ by refugees and migrants, the pendulum has swung the other way driven, by concerns over the future of liberal values. Postnationalism also takes on a potentially less welcome cast—for example, in postnational crime.

This conference provides new, updated discussions over the themes of postnationalism, citizenship and migration in the Mediterranean area. The real challenge that this conference wants to bring to postnationalism is, however, of a more normative character, dealing in particular with the deeply antagonistic bias that considers the interest of one side of the Mediterranean to be in conflict with the other. Against a longstanding tradition of historical pan-Mediterranean studies, this normative antagonistic bias goes so as far as to imagine that the two Mediterranean shores bifurcated in terms of North vs the South, rich vs. the poor, Christian vs. Muslim, democratic vs non-democratic, and so forth, all grounded in a not-so-hidden idea of good vs. bad. Ultimately we want to approach the developments of citizenship in the Mediterranean area from a variety of perspectives, arguing that postnationalism can still have much to say, as long as it is not imagined (regressively) as an opposition between an enlightened shore against the other, or (progressively) as the importing of postnational rights solely within self-contained national communities. Indeed, the Mediterranean area itself may be becoming the locus of a new normative framework.